Greetings
Lilly's tips An Edited Excerpt from Skinny-Dipping Copyright 2004 Claire Matturro All Rights Protected Chapter 13 If I had known that I would end up getting shot at and ruining one of my favorite suits, the blue seersucker from Nello's that cost a ton of money but fit like a tailor-made, all in all, I would have skipped what was primarily just a courtesy meeting with the good doctor, my new client, the obstetrician, Dr. Winston Calvin Randolph, the Second. Before I had my hand out and my smile fixed in place, Dr. Randolph's first words to me were “Where’s Jackson?” “Hello. I’m Lilly Cleary. I’m taking over your case from Jackson.” He started bitching, why was his case reassigned to a younger attorney, a woman attorney, an attorney in mid-stream, with the lawsuit pending for over a year and getting near a trial date? Where was Jackson? Was a woman tough enough to try a case like this? He didn't want some affirmative action hire handling his case. Et cetera. Oh, for crying out loud, I thought. Get over it. Girls get to practice law now. It's in one of the penumbras of the constitution. Instead of pointing that out, I decided to match arrogance for arrogance. “What you need to know, Dr. Randolph, is that I’m a board-certified trial attorney (this is true) and I graduated second in my law class (this is not true, but sounds good) and I’ve represented countless physicians in countless malpractice suits with favorable results (this is more or less true). You haven’t been abandoned.” “So, you’re a good attorney?” “No, Dr. Randolph. I’m not a good attorney. I’m an excellent attorney. Now, please, make yourself comfortable.” “Second in your law school?” “Yes,” I said, carving the lie into stone. I mean, who checks? The doctor took a seat at the head of the rosewood conference room table and grunted as he eased into the chair. “I’ve been to some malpractice seminars, you know. And what you need to do is file a motion for summary judgment on proximate cause.” Oh, frigging great. It took me a good half-hour to get him off of that one, pointing out repeatedly that we had already done that and lost, and then he was right back bitching about Jackson abandoning him to me, a mere female, and I'd had it up to here, and I said, “Look, first thing, we're going to have to do is coach you on your attitude.” “My attitude?” “Yes, juries hate arrogant pricks.” Yes, we were learning to work together well, weren't we? The upshot of this exchange was that Dr. Randolph insisted upon seeing Jackson, right then, and so I snapped something passably rude at him and said I would take him to Jackson “right then” and led him out the back door into the parking lot, which was by then largely deserted. My plan was to drive him to Jackson's house, where Jackson and his wife were no doubt enjoying a good wine over a low-fat dessert, probably some exotic, expensive fruit. Dr. Randolph instinctively headed toward Ashton's Lexus, and I said, “Nope, the Honda.” “This runs?” he asked, snidely. I had opened my mouth to say, “Like a little baby jet,” when a whisking, popping noise went off near by. The good doc and I looked at each other, and then looked around us. Another noise, like a backfire, went off, but this time something tore through the sleeve of my blue seersucker suit. “Chingalo,” I yelled, a word Bonita's son Benicio had taught me so I wouldn't sound crude and cheap by saying it in English, and I was thinking I'd paid $300 for the jacket alone, when I noticed Dr. Randolph had disappeared from sight. Dr. Randolph recognized gun shots for what they were. I reflected later, loudly and repetitively for his and everyone else's benefit, that he didn't think to warn me, or to knock me down and cover my body with his, or any of those chivalrous things a man is supposed to do when being shot at in the company of a woman. What he did was drop like a rock and crawl under my aged Honda. When the next bullet took out the window of my poor Honda and shattered shards of glass over me in a spray, I got it. I dropped like a rock, pulled out my cell phone, hit 911, and screeched into the ear of the poor woman answering the call that I was being shot at in the parking lot behind the law firm of Smith, O'Leary and Stanley, but before I gave the actual address, my cell phone exploded into tiny pieces of plastic, and I realized ducking was insufficient protection and I rolled under the car, colliding in a thunk with the shaking Dr. Randolph, and ruining the lovely, matching seersucker skirt to the jacket. LILLY BELLE'S BIO Lilly Belle's bio Copyright 2004 by Claire Hamner Matturro All Rights Protected My full name is Lillian Belle Rosemary Cleary, named after both grandmothers and a maiden aunt, and I haven't answered to Lilly Belle Rose since I was six and got expelled for hitting a boy who kept calling me that. In even the most modest shoe heel, I'm six feet tall. When I need to project power or instill fear, a black suit and a pair of three-inch heels pretty much does the job. I'm gaining on 35 at a rate that has exorbitantly sped up since I turned 30, and I'm not really that pretty, though often people think I am. It's my hair, my half-a-yard of thick, black shiny hair that I can use like a veil in the dance of the seven veils, and that stays just the right shade of black, with painfully maintained highlights of burnt sienna to belie the hair dye, thanks to Brock, my hairdresser and therapist. Except in bouts of high humidity, which in Sarasota is more often than not, my hair keeps just the right pageboy wave. That's why people think I'm pretty. That, and being thin, tall, and having blue eyes. What they call the Black Irish, that dark hair, pale skin and blue eyes. My two brothers are what I guess you'd call the Red Irish, big red faces and big heads of red hair, big, big hearts. Though my brothers stayed home in south Georgia, I moved to Sarasota straight out of law school because once when we were children we'd vacationed here with our father. My brothers and I had discovered that if you dug any kind of hole, it would fill up with water from the ground, and there were medieval statues of women and bulls and goddesses in the median of the Tamiami Trail near the Ringling Museum of Fine Arts, and the beaches went on forever with white sand washed by the turquoise Gulf of Mexico, and elegantly thin Royal Palms lined the city streets, and, in the bay front curve of the Tamiami Trail, majestic homes built in the 1920s boom stood in rows of grandeur not contemplated in my native south Georgia town. All that Sarasota grandeur was gone now. Over-development and progress and retirees seeking high-rise condos and not giving a rat's ass about history or architectural integrity, plus the passage of time itself, had conspired to render it all asunder. Even the high water table was gone, sucked out of the ground by greedy use and years of prolonged drought. But when I was six, I saw the city in the waning days of its glory, and I loved it, and I kept that image in my mind, and I wanted out of all that Georgia red dirt anyway, and so I came here to make my way in the world. And now, eight years later, I stared at my face in the lighted mirror of my own bathroom, and I wondered if the Retina A was really making any difference. I mean, I still saw those lines around my eyes. And the ones around my mouth. Sun. The number one cause of wrinkles. Should have stayed out of the sun, the dermatologist had told me. Oh, thanks, that's worth that $95 bill. Like I'd had a choice growing up in the deep south. Only people that didn't have sun-damaged skin in my Georgia town were either invalids, rich white ladies, or worked the night swift at the pickle factory and slept days. Sun. Yeah. To avoid it in Georgia, you have to stay indoors. And my mother's dominant child-raising technique when my brothers and I were children was to open the kitchen door while clutching her first Coca Cola bottle of the morning and say, “Shoo.” In the summer, that meant we played outside in the hot, bright sun until we saw my dad's car come up the driveway at dusk and we went in for supper. My brothers and I stayed sunburned. We'd eat lunch from our weekly allowance, fudgesicles, Dr. Pepper, cheese crackers and banana popsicles being the primary staples of our summer diet. During the school year, we ate the school lunches where the house specialty was lime Jell-O with green peas in it. My mother's idea of cooking dinner was to open cans – canned hash, canned chili, canned pears, canned beans. My father ate his noon meal at the Woolworth lunch counter and my mother drank Coca Cola and took pills from a bottle she hid under her mattress. I took one of those pills once when I nine and when it hit me I couldn't get up off the floor for over an hour. My brother Delvon took one and smashed his banana bike into a slash pine. Our middle brother had no imagination and never stole from our mother's stash. When we got older and the school nurse sent home a note saying our mother should fix us breakfast, she'd put a raw egg in a bottle of Yoo Hoo for us. By the time we were teenagers, she didn't even bother with the cans or the egg in the Yoo Hoo. It's a wonder we didn't all get scurvy. In that ill-nourished family, I was the baby and when I graduated from law school, my father, who was himself a lawyer, retired and moved to a fishing camp on a TVA lake, where he sits most of the daylight hours at the end of a dock, wearing a broad-brimmed Tilly hat I gave him, and he watches the life on the lake play itself out against the sun and the day. He sits so still that once a butterfly landed on his arm. My mother stayed in the house in town where she never gets out of her pajamas except to go to the occasional funeral. That's who I am, and that's what I was thinking about when Newly called me up to say he'd just heard on the police monitor that Dr. Trusdale had some kind of seizure and died, and the police were called to the house to investigate because it could be poison, and wasn't I defending him? and could he come over?  Claire Hamner Matturro photo by Mike Ewing Claire grew up in rural Alabama and on the gulf coast of Florida, graduated with honors from The University of Alabama College of Law, and was the first woman partner at the prestigious Sarasota, Florida law firm of Dickinson and Gibbons. After a decade of lawyering, she taught on the writing faculty at Florida State University College of Law, and has also taught at the University of Oregon School of Law. Now writes full time, lives in south Georgia with her husband, Bill, and their 21-year-old cat. |
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